US Elections: Austin, We Have A Problem

Do you remember "Soap", the TV serial that began each week
with someone recapping what had happened last week and then
saying: "Confused? You won't be after this week's episode"?
Well, substitute 'hour' for 'week' and 'Vote' for 'Soap'
and you've pretty much got the idea of what it's like to
watch TV news bulletins at the moment here in
America.

Confusion has become such an expected part of the
discourse that on Friday I mistook a printing problem for
the funniest cartoon yet. It was in the "First new metro
daily of the 21st century" and was headed "What Happens
Next? A citizen's guide to presidential succession". That
much, at least was pretty clear but the rest of the graphic
looked as though a band of presidential pixies had stomped
through it with their little square boots on and it was
completely unreadeadable. You can see why I thought that WAS
the cartoon.

But in this morning's Sunday edition the San
Francisco Examiner has printed it again, minus the
pixelation, though the paper still is having problems with
its graphics. You might wonder why a newspaper with a
113-year-history has suddenly become the first new metro
daily of the 21st century, but it's because the Hearst
Corporation, which owned it all those years, decided to buy
the San Francisco Chronicle and was hit with an
anti-monopoly protest. The corporation relinquished the SFE
(plus its library and a $66 million dollar subsidy) to
publisher Ted Fang, whose family has several community
papers in its stable, and the new daily came out on
Wednesday.

Well, it kinda came out on Wednesday. Fang
decided to change it to a morning paper instead of an
afternoon one and all the early morning TV news bulletins
were poised to show it rolling off the presses. Instead we
saw printers lounging around on rolls of newsprint waiting
for someone to deliver good old-fashioned plates to the
factory because the printing company's computer couldn't
read the electronic files it had been supplied with. KRON4 -
naturally, as it's part of the Chronicle media group -
lingered on this story rather lovingly and in the evening
bulletin even had their printing people going through the
Examiner page by page pointing out all the bad points,
like type weight inconsistent across the columns.

It
brought to mind the carping that attended another media
event some 2 and a quarter centuries ago. A staymaker cum
failed excise man from England, newly arrived in
Pennsylvania, published a little pamphlet entitled "Common
Sense" under an agreement that the publisher, Robert Bell,
should keep half the profits and give the other half to buy
mittens for American troops fighting the French up in
Canada. Bell wasn't satisfied with this and sent a bill to
the author demanding payment for publishing it, so the
author went elsewhere for the second edition of this runaway
bestseller. Bell then roundly dismissed the new edition
saying it was printed on poor paper using small type.

The
author was Thomas Paine and that pamphlet and many more he
wrote afterwards were the melding force that convinced
waverers that America should not be a colony of Britain. He
was the first to use the term "the United States of
America", in one of his "Crisis" pamphlets during the War of
Independence, and it is to his famous phrase "the summer
soldier and the sunshine patriot" that some of today's
commentators turn when asked how long the battle for
Florida will go on. They will not, "in this crisis, shrink
from the service of their country" as each sees it.

And
they all see it differently. The Democrats say that Gore
said he'd fight for the people and that's what he's doing
in Florida - fighting for the right of people to have their
vote counted - and he won't give up even in the face of
organized mobs of Republicans intimidating the Miami-Dade
canvassing board into giving up. That wasn't a mob, reply
the Republicans: "America was designed to hear many voices;
even those who wear button-down shirts", and if Gore cares
so much about the people why did Democrats issue a 5-page
memo describing how to disqualify absentee military
votes?

It comes to a minor head tonight or tomorrow, of
course, with the expected certification by Katherine Harris
of the Florida election results. But no-one's planning any
celebrations, their sights being fixed on Friday's United
States Supreme Court hearing, which C-Span is trying to
persuade the justices to allow them to televise. But you
should not think of the Katherine Harris and the Supreme
Court as being part of two separate spheres of Government.
Rather they are part of a Russian doll, with Harris being
the outer doll and the Constitution being the inner
one.

The Constitution established only one court and that
was the US Supreme Court, which is the second most
innermost doll in my little word-graphic. That court's only
functions are to rule on whether the federal and state laws
are constitutional, whether the president's actions are
constitutional, and to settle problems between states. Each
state has its own constitution - the next doll - and all
state laws must agree with that, so it is the function of
each state's supreme court to see that such is the case. And
on the outside of the state supreme court doll is the state
legislature doll, which is where the bulk of the law-making
powers of "we the people" reside.

The case in the US
Supreme Court on Friday is to do with whether the Florida
Supreme Court interfered wrongly with those law-making
powers by choosing between two conflicting, unclear sections
in Florida law regarding the validity of manual recounts.
Title IX, Chapter 103 of the Florida statutes is very clear,
however, on one point: "The Department of State shall
certify as elected the presidential electors of the
candidates for President and Vice President who receive the
highest number of votes." And that is the part of the story
that will be delivered by Katherine Harris.

Meantime,
anyone with any common sense is buying the coins being sold
at washingtonmint.com showing Gore on one side and Bush on
the other. And subscribing to SFE. She's the voice of the
new California, which seriously does believe America was
designed to hear many voices and will "celebrate diversity
through unity". Go, Ted!

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